How to translate figure during walk cycle?

I've created a simple walk cycle aniblock, but my Genesis stays in one spot. I've looked at the graph editor to edit the hip's Y position, but this doesn't feel right. The figure's translation should be changing while the walk cycle is active, not the hip because that's used for the actual walking motion.

Any ideas how to do this?

Thanks

Comments

I've created a simple walk cycle aniblock, but my Genesis stays in one spot. I've looked at the graph editor to edit the hip's Y position, but this doesn't feel right. The figure's translation should be changing while the walk cycle is active, not the hip because that's used for the actual walking motion.

Any ideas how to do this?

Thanks

In aniMate2, you should use the Z motion for forward movement.

aniMate2 does some special things to be able to go between blocks smoothly. For example, if you have your block ending with a hip-Y rotation greater than ??25 degrees??, then aniMate2 considers that you want a turn done.

aniMate2 will only allow one setting of the figure's translation per track. It makes sense, if you think about it, because blocks should be reuseable in any position in any scene. If you set the figure's absolute translation in a block, then you can't use it in a different scene where the figure's position relative to the action happening will be different.

So you describe your action inside the block, and then outside the block you set the figure's position for that action.

I hope I understood your question - I broke the cardinal rule of not replying before morning coffee.

The hip's Z position. You should never put the figure's position inside an aniBlock. At all.

You should only set the figure's position outside of the block once for the scene.

To take a simple example for explanation. Say you made a sitting pose for V4 inside an aniBlock. This sitting pose will work for a particular chair, but you don't know where in the scene that chair will be placed. When you load the chair in a new scene, you move the chair to it's correct position. Then you apply the aniBlock to V4. V4 is now sitting, but in the wrong place in the scene. Outside of the block, you move V4 to the right place. You then do this again to M4.

If you had the figure's position inside the block, then V4 and M4 would be sitting in the same place in the scene, which would be a long way from the chair.

When saving poses or animation, the figure itself should not be keyed, only the figure's joints.

Admission: I don't use aniblocks so I can't say anything about how it works or if it compensates for what I'm about to describe.

Walk Cycles,
if your character is walking in place and you move the person in a Z translation your most likely are going to get slippage where the feet meet the street. Two keyframes; point A to Point B will cause slipping feet.

What you really want is to use IK, pin the feet to the floor and move the feet and hips in Z as the character walks. Thats three parts moving in Z at different times. I suppose that cycle could be an aniblock, then outside of the block you could translate the BODY/master using a series of CONSTANT keyframes, meaning that it wouldn't slide your character forward until the beginning of each walk cycle, which would happen with Linear or Splined keys.

Just a trick I've used in the past when I haven't wanted to animate an IK walk cycle for the entire 220 frames of a scene.

Thanks for the explanation...I have been trying to get my custom aniBlock working but I was running into problems such as my figure moving backwards during the animation. I think it is due to the fact that I did the translations in the aniBlock using the figure's coordinates instead of the hip coordinates. I will retrying using hip coordinates and see if that resolves my problem.